RSA Moving pictures: Initial Ideas & Learning about lip syncing

Today we had a workshop about learning to do Lip Syncs and Spotting the audio track and to begin gathering ideas for how and what we are going to animate for the RSA Brief. To begin the day we watched an animated segment of a programme called ” Creature Comforts”:

Creature comforts is animated in the same style as Wallace and Gromit, the creature comforts we watched is from the television series following an animated short film of the same name from 1989. We got to see some of the making of the show aswell which was really interesting and has got my very excited about creating my own stop motion with 3D modelling in this style. I think it would be a really involved and creative way of animating using my sculpture skills from my previous years in university and i like the idea of creating characters with different moveable mouth pieces and eye lids that can convey alot of different expressions.

After this we started discussing how you can create a lip sync in animation, and it involves carefully studying the sound for the animation frame by frame to create a “Dope Sheet” of all of the sounds like “k” and “m” ( all phonetic sounds) so that you can work out how the mouth will be shaped when its forming these words. I have had a go at a dope sheet for the sound clip “Curiosity”, its not as detailed and involved as that of an animator but i think it will serve its purpose in helping me if i choose to create a narrative that involves a lip sync. We also learned about how there are some basic mouth shapes already out there for use by animators and the amount varies, they are shaped in a way that is influenced by the phonetics of words and sounds. below are some examples of mouth shapes i could use :

i like this one because it’s quite a small selection that covers quite a range of mouth shapes, hopefully this is the amount of mouth shapes i could use as a basis for my lip sync. I will also look at the animators survival guide book for tips on this too, because these only show the mouths from the frontal position and it would be good to see them profile also.

i found this second one online and i think it will be useful for when i create characters from clay/ Plasticine 🙂

The programme i used to do the Spotting was Adobe After Effects, or you could use Adobe Premier. These are quite new programmes to me and i’m looking forward to learning to use them at least on a basic level. I had a go at using Adobe Premier the night before this workshop when i had an idea for a 6 second segment of the talk on curiosity, which was when the words ” Sometimes i hear that curiosity and creativity are killed by too many facts” and this led me to thinking of humorous ways this could be shown, i also thought about accessibility to the public and about how animation and videos in general are easily accessible through YOUTUBE, and perhaps i could use segments of videos from here to reach the public on a level they are comfortable with and gain enjoyment from. Its youtube law that you may use up to 10 seconds of another persons video without infringing upon any copy write, so this is what i decided to try. Also relevant pop culture at the moment has an obsession with videos featuring cute animals, and these are both loved and easy to understand so i decided to try utilising one of these in my first animation experiment to create humour and an way of illuminating the idea of curiosity being killed by facts in a way that shows it as a physical act and not a metaphor.

I used Adobe premier in which i imported the sound clip, the video i chose which was downloaded from youtube and i created quick small images featuring the words “Curiosity and Creativity” and “Fact” to integrate into my animation, i chose to personify these words by putting them over the faces of the animals, which were in question a single cat being smothered by a group of puppies ( in a playful way, but it still fits well with the chosen sentence) Here is a screenshot of my working, i used Key framing animation and i used ultra key to hide the green colour from my original images. I also made sure that the layers i used was matched up the sound as best as i could, this took a while and i found this programme quite easy to use after some playing with.

Below is the little segment of animation i made, it looks very primitive but i think the idea behind it has some standing and i could further explore the use of using social media videos and popular culture to make the talk more accessible to the public.

From this i will go on to experiment with all the types of animation i have been introduced to today and look at the animations in the list given to us. I want to try:

stop motion animation

drawn animation

computer animation ( a bit more sophisticated than the one i tried above)